Company Indicted Over Food Contamination

Published 8:00 pm, Wednesday, June 18, 2003

A cold storage company and three executives were indicted on conspiracy charges after federal agents seized more than 22 million pounds of contaminated food from a rat-infested warehouse.

"We will not tolerate people committing criminal conduct when it comes to food products," U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said Wednesday in announcing the five-count indictment.

Meat, fish, cheese, butter and other foods were impounded at the LaGrou Cold Storage Inc. warehouse a year ago after an inspection of the 500,000-square-foot building.

Prosecutors declined to described just how badly the 86-year-old warehouse on Chicago's West Side was contaminated, but officials said the seizure was one of the largest of spoiled food in government history.

Charged in the indictment were LaGrou, its president and CEO, Jack Stewart, 53; director of sales Michael Faucher, 45; and warehouse manager David Smith, 43. Attorneys for the three and LaGrou general counsel William Biederman did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

At the core of the indictment are charges that the defendants lied to customers who stored food in the warehouse, saying goods were damaged because of forklifts or faulty packaging rather than rats that had overrun the warehouse.

The three met weekly to discuss the problems starting in 1999, but rather than take corrective action, they sent employees on "rat patrols" to remove dead rodents and droppings, the indictment said. It said some internal records marked products contaminated by rodents with the initials "MM" _ for Mickey Mouse, according to prosecutors.

Fitzgerald said there is no evidence that anyone in the Chicago area became ill from eating food from the warehouse. He said the warehouse has been closed under court order.

Authorities in Chicago have been cracking down on food warehouses over rodent problems for years.

In 2001, Chicago wholesale food distributor Hop Kee Inc. and its chief executive pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from the discovery of more than 61,000 pounds of rat-infested poultry products, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A year earlier, the former owner of Helmos Food Products in Chicago was convicted on charges related to storing and distributing rodent-infested products. A USDA officer described seeing live mice and rodent droppings covering a pallet of meat and said the scene, where authorities seized more than 100,000 pounds of food intended for small groceries and restaurants, was the worst he had seen.